BREAKING NEWS

Educators reach for the stars at NASA workshop

MARTINSBURG – Approximately 20 Berkeley County teachers got a jump on the new school year Wednesday by attending a special workshop hosted by STARBASE Martinsburg and featuring NASA-certified trainers.

During the day-long session, NASA education specialist Pam Casto introduced the federal agency’s IV&V (Independent Verification and Validation) Facility and introduced two lessons designed to provide students with hands-on experience in STEM subjects including science, technology, engineering and math.

The IV&V facility is located in Fairmont, West Virginia, and has its own Educator Resource Center that provides professional development to teachers. It also has more than $1 million worth of equipment that’s available on loan to teachers who receive this certification.

Casto said the teachers who attended this local training are now eligible to use this equipment in their classrooms.

Thanks to this experience, teachers were introduced to using robotics in grades K-8, as well as using them to teach across curricular subjects.

“For example, they built a drumming monkey to be used to teach math and social studies, because they looked at other cultures and differences in drumming among them,” Casto said.

Others built a hungry alligator that can be used to teach number lines such as a temperature scale. “And being a reptile who is cold-blooded, his mouth opens and closes more slowly when it is cold and faster when it is hot – thanks to a program that allows the alligator to respond to the temperatures,” she said.

The second half of the day focused on “Afterschool Universe,” and is popular because people of all ages are so interested in what lies beyond the heavens such as black holes, Casto said.

This type of STEM education is important to NASA “because we want to keep students interested in these subjects so that we will have the workforce we need coming up. These are going to be our future engineers and scientists.”

“For a while we lost a lot of people who were going into those fields and there was a shortage, so that we had to bring people in from other countries to hire,” she said.

STARBASE program director Sherra Triggs said federal funding is available through the rest of this fiscal year which ends Sept. 30. The program is a partnership with the Department of Defense and it provides funding for 76 sites nationwide, she said.

Triggs said the program started locally 12 years ago and is housed at the West Virginia Air National Guard 167th Airlift Wing where fifth-graders -including public schools, some private and home-schooled students – come with their teachers to spend a week during the school year. It has also expanded into Jefferson County with two teachers dedicated to those students, she said.

Planning for the upcoming school year is already underway and students will begin coming to the facility during their first week back to classes, Triggs said.

“In a year, we usually work with at least 2,000 students,” she said, adding that an after-school program, STARBASE 2.0, is also offered to help “foster the STEM spark.”

Mentors are needed to help with this program at various schools. Training is provided and additional information is available by calling Ashley Spies at 304-616-5501.